It was so easy to leave my house and quickly start painting a landscape at Bitter Lake that I did another one today. It was a much nicer day, the sun was out and I had a good time.
Lately I have been really influenced by Marc Dalessio not only is he an amazing artist, he does a ton of landscapes, and he give wonderful information on his website. So today’s influence from Marc was three thing. First was wearing a lighter shirt to paint in. The last time I was out here my canvas was super dark and Marc indicated that he only paints in light blue shirts indicating that its reflective values lights up his paintings a bit without any side effects. Second influence was standing up. I usually sit down when I do a landscape because my feet tend to hurt but for this painting I stood the whole time so I could get away from my painting and use a more site size approach. The third influence was medium. The last painting I felt as if the paint was really hard to move around, so I decided to use a Gamblin out of the bottle medium and it was great I should have been doing this the whole time. Not only will I get a better idea of what medium I actually prefer, but its much easier to paint with it.
So with all these changes to my normal technique I think the painting turned out rather well. And I had a ton of fun painting it. So much so that I did another painting after this one, I will post about that next. The focus for this painting was values. Marc indicates that values are the most important in landscape painting with drawing coming in at a close second, and I will have to agree.
Note for a tip that I need to add. “You can only paint as good as you can draw”. Not sure who said that but, I heard it recently, I’m pretty sure it was from Marc Dalessio.
The Painting
The Location
Drawing
focus on values.
Value
How can I improve the values?
So the distant pine trees are too light. Looks like I tend to make distant dark object too light, I did the same thing in the last painting. I think the tops of the right pine trees need to be a bit darker, but that could be incorrect as the light and dark areas at the top of the tree are so broken up that they are tending to blend together.
What is most interesting is that the light areas on the grass are only light due to the high chroma of the paint. Their real value is very dark, wow! I have such issue with these high chroma colors I may have to do a bunch of paintings just dealing with this.